This is our plight, this loss of God coupled with a continuing participation in the form of life which gives religious discourse its meaning. The mystical, as defined by Wittgenstein, persists, but those who are drawn to it find that there is nothing that can be satisfactorily said of it: religious language, though meaningful, is grounded in nothing other than our human mores. Where do we go from there?

Some of us are quite content to turn attention away from the limits of language back to the scientific. But others will continue to be driven towards those limits, and, perhaps surprisingly, they will find that religion itself gives expression to the loss, the absence of God, and is possibly at its most beautiful when it does precisely that.

Perhaps the most poignant religious expression of the loss of God is that moment within the Christian story when the sense of loss is projected onto God himself, in the person of Jesus Christ crying out “My God, why have you forsaken me?” The same loss is replayed in numberless Christian artworks. The aria “Erbarme dich” in Bach’s St Matthew Passion, for example, speaks of a yearning for God that is so intense that the spirituality is located more squarely in the yearning than in the (nonsensical, non-existent) entity which is superficially its object. One might object that in Christianity as traditionally conceived that loss of God is transient, it is the prelude to a reunification with him. Well, yes. But our religious consciousness evolves with our scientific and philosophical discoveries, and our interpretation of Christian mythology evolves accordingly. A story that was once about our separation from and reunification with God can equally well serve as the expression of a sense of separation that reaches its culmination not only in the death of Christ, but also in the death of the idea of a transcendent God, by means of which death we are acquainted with a painfully less satisfying, but immediately present, divinity, located nowhere other than in our shared religious observances. This would be a form of atheism that is either deeply friendly to religion, or actually religious itself. I’m not sure that it matters much which we call it. This form of atheism would be enriched by a stroll around a cathedral which is empty of God but saturated with the practices by which religious meaning is generated.